Biden’s Hopes That the Fed Might Rescue His Campaign Are Looking Dimmer by the Month

Any hopes that President Biden is nursing that the Federal Reserve might rescue his campaign by cutting interest rates are looking dimmer by the month — starting with the latest numbers out of Washington.The central bank’s decision to hold interest rates steady despite Wall Street — and the White House’s — rooting for a rate cut no doubt reflects, among other things, the stubbornly hot inflation as shown in March’s Personal Consumption Expenditure report, one of the Fed’s most carefully monitored measures for inflation. Mr. Biden shouldn’t place his bets on a rate cut by July either, says a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Desmond Lachman, who predicts that the central bank will likely hold the current 23-year-high rate through June and July’s Committee meetings as they wait for signs of progress in the fight against inflation.“We will have to let the data lead us,” the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, announced in a post-Committee press conference on Wednesday, offering a rate cut timeline for which he is “gaining confidence” will “take longer than thought.”That leaves just one more Committee meeting after the July meeting and one more opportunity for the Biden Administration to see rates eased, for Mr. Biden to make good on his prediction to see a reduction “before the year is out” and also before November’s election.As Americans approach the polls with inflation top of their list of issue concerns, it is yet to be seen whether Mr. Powell’s uncertain timeline for achieving 2 percent will inspire confidence in voters. Recent GDP numbers aren’t doing Mr. Biden any favors either, with last week’s report that the first-quarter GDP growth rate slowed to 1.6 percent, well below consensus estimates of 2.4 percent, marking the weakest pace of growth since the second quarter of 2022. All three of the major market indices — The Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq Composite — closed lower by the end of the day the report was released.While it’s expected for growth to slow as inflation comes down, inflation has instead stayed stubbornly strong, with reports of consumer prices rising 3.5 percent from a year ago in March. Slow economic growth, coupled with high inflation, have stoked fears of stagflation and raise concerns over the Fed’s path to achieving disinflation. The next big data drop comes on Friday with the release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s jobs report, which the Biden Administration — as well as Wall Street — will look to for a show of market strength, or at least, if the result proves weaker than expected, to see resulting rate cuts. Mr. Powell squashed any hope for the latter outcome, however, noting at Wednesday’s press conference that it would take a “meaningful” and “unexpected” drop to “lead us to think that the labor market was really significantly weakening.”While Mr. Lachman forecasts that, contrary to consensus estimates, Friday’s report will show weakness, he suspects that the result of the jobs report, whatever the direction, will do little to lighten the mood of voters. “It’s not about whether Biden could achieve 3.7 percent unemployment rather than 3.8 percent, it’s the fact that prices have gone up by 18 percent since he took office,” he says. “And they don’t show signs of reversing.”

Biden’s Hopes That the Fed Might Rescue His Campaign Are Looking Dimmer by the Month

Biden’s Hopes That the Fed Might Rescue His Campaign Are Looking Dimmer by the Month

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